This week: health check, Uniqlo sale, & tons of rain

It's been a week full of rain, cancelled meet-ups, post-poned meetups, schedule changes, and almost starting a fire in my apartment. (!)

First off the rain - monsoon season has arrived. Actually I had no idea what this really was until I googled it.

Monsoon is traditionally defined as a seasonal reversing wind accompanied by corresponding changes in precipitation, but is now used to describe seasonal changes in atmospheric circulation and precipitation associated with the asymmetric heating of land and sea.

I'm one week into monsoon season and I've already realized how unreliable the Weather app on my iPhone is. The night before it will say 30% chance of rain and then the next morning it will say 90%.

About almost starting a fire in my apartment... My Canadian friend and I decided to make banana bread for her Korean boyfriend's mom. She used her recipe and made everything in her room and brought it upstairs to my apartment, since I have a mini-oven {read: convectional oven}. We put them in little bread tin foil trays and went down to her apartment to wash dishes. The bread was supposed to bake for an hour so we were going to come right back. Well, I came back about 10-15 minutes later. The top of the bread was completely black and smoke was coming out of the top of the oven! So eventually we just made a few muffins and scratched the rest of the batch to head out for a walk. We went to Hyundai Department Store because I wanted to check out the Uniqlo summer sale! Uniqlo is my favorite store/brand ever!! It's from Japan but prices are cheaper in Korea.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="342"] 2 shirts and polka-dot shorts for me, a famous Hokkaido (the island we lived on in Japan) butter shirt for Choi.[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_63" align="aligncenter" width="300"] A random lunch I ate while I watched 30 minutes of torrential downpour.[/caption][caption id="attachment_64" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Found a new cupcake shop 5 minutes away from my apartment. Going to go soon!![/caption][caption id="attachment_66" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Got a health check done for my contract renewal. Had to wear this odd top for a chest x-ray. The doctor pointed to my lung and said "heart" but I thought she said "hard" so I was confused for about 10 seconds as she ushered me out.[/caption]

Tomorrow: test lesson with a potential Korean tutor, picking up some books I bought off of Craigslist, shoe shopping, and enjoying some hand-drip coffee in Hapjeong.

JLPT + 7/1/2012 iPhoneography

Well today I took the JLPT in Seoul. N5, I'm such an underachiever. I've attempted N4 in Chicago (missed by 3 points!) so I think I can fairly say that Korea managed to mess some things up today.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="608"] Super awkward shoe covers.[/caption]

First of all, my test was at a middle school near Seoul Station (kinda old downtown). I arrived at the station an hour before my test and it took me about 30 minutes to find the school, with the help of an ajumma on the street. I think I was the only foreigner taking this level and all the printed information was in Korean, which was pretty self explanatory but later on when they were giving instructions in Korean before the test I was just watching other people to see when they opened the test booklet. ANYWAYS, we had to wear these shoe covers in the school, which looked really funny with girls wearing high heels under them. Imagine 200 Korean people walking around a school with these things on - I was laughing in my head.

Then my test proctor managed to get a few things wrong... She was late to start checking IDs before handing out the answer keys. After she finished handing out all the answer keys everyone realized they had someone else's answer key. So we spent another 3 minutes giving everyone their correct one. Then the test started but we didn't have our test booklets yet. The proctor was slowly passing them out and once I was about 9 questions into the booklet she handed out another test booklet. So we had two sections of booklets sitting on our tables for about 3 minutes. Eventually the proctor made her way around the room and collected the wrong booklets but she didn't take the answer key. So when the time for that section actually came, I was already about one-sixth done and I could have looked off of others partially-marked answer keys during the intermission.

So in conclusion, my test proctor was missing some brain cells. In Chicago everything was tightly guarded and the test people were a lot more friendly. There, to get into the test room you had to show an ID and your proctor sheet. They asked you your birthday in Japanese and then you could go in. My test proctor in Chicago was just an ordinary American that had passed N1 but she was much better than today's proctor.

Now for this week's iPhoneography: